NIE

The U.S. has recently shared new intelligence with the International Atomic Energy Agency on key aspects of Iran's nuclear program that Washington says shows Tehran was directly engaged in trying to make a bomb, diplomats said Thursday.

Nobody actually said very much but Israeli officials seemed happy with how talks about Iran went here last week with U.S. President George W. Bush.

An Israeli delegation is holding a series of meetings in the United States to argue that Iran still seeks nuclear arms despite a US intelligence report to the contrary, a daily said on Sunday.

Over a week after a US intelligence report revealed that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003, the saber-rattling inside the Washington Beltway appears to have receded for the moment, and with it, the George W Bush administration's strongest pretext for a military confrontation with Iran.

The US National Intelligence Estimate's (NIE) assertion that Iran currently does not have a nuclear weapons program has caused much frustration in Israel. Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh referred to the report as a lie at a recent breakfast in New York, and Infrastructure Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer reportedly "doesn't buy" its findings.

A new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), entitled “Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities,” has just dealt a serious blow to the argument some of us have been making that Iran is intent on building nuclear weapons and that neither diplomacy nor sanctions can prevent it from succeeding. Thus, this latest NIE “judges with high confidence that in fall 2003 Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program”; it “judges with high confidence that the halt was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran’s previously undeclared nuclear work”; it “assesses with moderate confidence that Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007”; it assesses, also with only “moderate confidence that the halt to those activities represents a halt to Iran’s entire nuclear weapons program”; but even if not, it judges “with high confidence that Iran will not be technically capable of producing and reprocessing enough plutonium for a weapon before about 2015.”